Recent advances in computer networking and processing make images easily accessible. However, public access of images, especially images containing human faces raises concerns about privacy. There have been some previous efforts to protect the privacy of people appearing in an image by making their faces unrecognizable to obscure their identities. To obscure a face in an image, a region containing the face has to be identified first. Automatic face detection techniques can help to identity face regions when processing a large number of images. However, the accuracy of automatic face detection techniques raises concerns. There can be false positives where detected regions do not correspond to faces. There can also be regions containing faces that are not detected. In addition, to obscure a face, the detected face region in the image is usually replaced by a replacement shape with solid color or mosaics. Although the identities are obscured for the individuals whose faces otherwise appear in the image, the image appearance is adversely affected by replacing faces with other shapes used in such methods.